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Ask HN: Should you release many products to see what takes off?

6 points by lsemel ↗ HN
Is it better to test out many ideas and see what sticks, or focus on your first idea? Quickly releasing multiple products, each with the minimum viable feature set, seems like a good strategy because nobody knows what will catch on. The odds of your first idea being exactly right aren't be that high. By releasing the next idea quickly, you have more shots at creating something that catches on, and you avoid pouring a lot of time and effort into an idea which might not work no matter how many features or refinements you add. On the other hand, you may be giving up too quickly on a product which could succeed with more time and effort. Thoughts?

6 comments

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baran
Customer development - find out what someone is willing to pay for.
thesecret
I think releasing several products might not be that great of an idea because a large part of a successful startup is your ability to market and attract users.

Setting up the startup/product is easy...it's getting people to use it and retaining them which is hard

dryicerx
I think it really depends on the products...

If you are talking about simple web apps with quick development times and maintenance, I see no problem attacking with multiple products simultaneously. But the down side is, most quickly developed apps require a critical mass quickly (and to get there quickly you need to market and get the word out, which you need time). The other downside is their easy to be cloned by someone before reaching critical mass (due to quick dev time).

Now if you're building a bit more involved project with complex development, high server requirements, or needs users to put a lot of trust in your system, I would highly suggest deviating attention away from it.

jacquesm
I know several very successful companies that followed this route, but you have to be pretty ruthless at the moment you realize that one thing has significantly more momentum than the rest, and you have to have a nicely filled war chest to get started.

Let's take one of them as an example. The company launched with 7 different websites, was self funded by a previous successful exit of one of the founders. After about 6 months it became clear that one of the sites was becoming the leader in terms of growth.

So they divested 3 of the remaining six and literally killed the other 3 to be able to focus on the one that mattered.

They ended up doing very well on the last one.

The catch here is that this company was started with a lot more money than most start-ups and could afford to run effectively 7 start-ups in parallel.

For most other parties this would have translated in on average three failures before scoring a hit, and even that figure is way above the industry average.

mahmud
If you can churn out products, you probably aren't doing much to create them to begin with: it takes a lot of effort to bring something worth buying to the market; if you must test the waters, spend more time on the research phase and implement something that's desperately needed, even if you develop it for one client as a consultant.
10ren
Sony and HP started out with many products.

> Of the many projects they worked on, their very first financially successful product was a precision audio oscillator, the Model HP200A. (emphasis added) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard#Founding (Wikipedia doesn't mention it for Sony)

Doesn't mean it's "better" to start off this way, only that it's possible.